it was called, and the painter’s name was Martin.  If he was to do so now, the public (who are vulgar) would exclaim ‘Betty Martin.’  Not that they disbelieve in it, but that the attractions of the place are dying out, like those of Bath and Cheltenham.

Of course some blame attaches to the divines themselves that things have come to such a pass.  ‘I protest,’ says a great philosopher, ’that I never enter a church, but the man in the pulpit talks so unlike a man, as though he had never known what human joys or sorrows are—­so carefully avoids every subject of interest save one, and paints that in colours at once so misty and so meretricious—­that I say to myself, I will never sit under him again.’  This may, of course, be only an ingenious excuse of his for not going to church; but there is really something in it.  The angels, with their harps, on clouds, are now presented to the eyes, even of faith, in vain; they are still appreciated on canvas by an old master, but to become one of them is no longer the common aspiration.  There is a suspicion, partly owing, doubtless, to the modern talk about the dignity and even the divinity of Labour, that they ought to be doing something else than (as the American poet puts it with characteristic ii reverence) ’loafing about the throne;’ that we ourselves, with no ear perhaps for music, and with little voice (alas!) for praise, should take no pleasure in such avocations.  It is not the sceptics—­though their influence is getting to be considerable—­who have wrought this change, but the conditions of modern life.  Notwithstanding the cheerful ‘returns’ as to pauperism, and the glowing speeches of our Chancellors of the Exchequer, these conditions are far harder, among the thinking classes, than they were.  The question ‘Is Life worth Living?’ is one that concerns philosophers and metaphysicians, and not the persons I have in my mind at all; but the question, ’Do I wish to be out of it?’ is one that is getting answered very widely—­and in the affirmative.  This was certainly not the case in the days of our grand-sires.  Which of them ever read those lines—­

    ’For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,
    This pleasing anxious being e’er resigned,
    Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
    Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?’—­

without a sympathetic complacency?  This may not have been the best of all possible worlds to them, but none of them wished to exchange it, save at the proper time, and for the proper place.  Thanks to overwork, and still more to over-worry, it is not so now.  There are many prosperous persons in rude health, of course, who will ask (with a virtuous resolution that is sometimes to be deplored), ’Do you suppose then that I wish to cut my throat?’ I certainly do not.  Do not let us talk of cutting throats; though, mind you, the average of suicides, so admirably preserved by the Registrar-General and other painstaking persons,